Just load the videos locally. How many videos do you need on it at one time.

Whenever you get into the "How much do you need" arguments it gets bad. Really, I need nothing. I mean, I have skymall magazine to read, right? And when I'm done with that I can force my seatmates into 10 hours of hangman and tic tac toe games on our napkins.

How much do I want though? How much am I willing to spend money to get? Much much bigger than 8GB, that's for sure.

Whenever you get into the "How much do you need" arguments it gets bad. Really, I need nothing. I mean, I have skymall magazine to read, right? And when I'm done with that I can force my seatmates into 10 hours of hangman and tic tac toe games on our napkins.

How much do I want though? How much am I willing to spend money to get? Much much bigger than 8GB, that's for sure.

Each person is going to have their own wants, and I do think 8GB is low enough that they should provide and SD card slot (or something similar). In fact, that is probably one of the easiest ways to provide expandability. If you don't need more than 8GB, you're set. If you want more, than an additional 8GB is $10 to $20 away.

If I were going on a long trip, then I'd probably want more than 8GB. The cloud does have its limits. I'm a user who likes music, and likes it in FLAC format. I'm not sure that the cloud can really satisfy my needs in terms of this type of format. I'd like it to, but the bandwidth isn't there and too many network providers limit the amount of data that can be transmitted. These are huge limitations that I hope will go away some day.

Unfortunately, this won't ever happen. Amazon is competing with Apple and I don't think Apple has ever added expandability in that regards, and Amazon probably doesn't feel a need to offer more given the price-point their selling at.

you only have access to the cloud storage if you're near wifi. if you're say at the beach, you won't be able to access your stuff.

if you want to watch a couple movies, downloading them will take quite a while - and will use up a lot of your battery.

amazon cloud storage will become something hackers will not be able to resist trying for. if they do manage to bring it down, you won't be able to download your stuff at all during that period, or at all if they find a way to damage it.

uploading large files - which are the ones that one would need to store - takes a long time. i know people with .75 Mbps upload speed. and btw, uploading movies to the cloud server will suck down your battery.

i know people whose servers were somehow hacked, and they were careful and pros. will data in the cloud servers be secure? don't bet on it. we had a trojan inserted into all our web pages once, and our logins are long and random. it was done through an exploit in a program. these things can and do happen. people's passwords get successfully guessed or intercepted via malware. or via phishing scams.

lots of people will be storing largish things - and they're going to have to pay to store. i'm reading comments from people on amazon who plan to store their entire video libraries. in those cases the kindle fire is a way to upsell them into a monthly recurring fee.

I fully expect Amazon to be selling me the Fire (2) with expandable memory next year. I don't blame people for calling this a deal breaker though. 8GB is really anemic in today's market.

I really doubt that - the whole point of the Fire is to sell their own media to you (and their cloud storage service).

While I don't think they are taking a loss on the hardware, it's likely at a very slim margin - they don't really want people who aren't going to buy media from them (or their cloud storage).

Quote:

Originally Posted by basschick

you only have access to the cloud storage if you're near wifi. if you're say at the beach, you won't be able to access your stuff.

if you want to watch a couple movies, downloading them will take quite a while - and will use up a lot of your battery.

It's an LCD tablet - why are you taking it to the beach to begin with? (Not to mention the small percentage of people who actually have a beach and the amount of time they spend there...)

And you might have missed it, but streaming movies is huge business these days. Netflix, Hulu, etc, etc, etc. Something like half the internet bandwidth is used for video streaming, most of which is done via boxes hooked up to a TV (mostly game consoles, ironically, but also dedicated boxes). The only difference is that it would now go to a tablet.

The KFire screen is only 1024 x 600 pixels. HD would be wasted on such a screen. Even 720p is too big to fit the whole frame on it as it requires a 1280 x 720 pixel area. I would be willing to bet that Amazon will merely upconvert 480p non-HD video for the KFire. If so, the files will be relatively small yet still look like they were HD due to the small, bright screen.

the beach was an example, but i take my current tablet various places to work. the bottom line - not everyplace has wifi.

streaming is huge business, but lots of wifi spots are slow. that means lots of pausing to buffer, which can make a movie too annoying to watch. besides, i don't rip my dvd's - i was reporting what people were saying they wanted to do, and that was store their movie collection on the cloud server.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JeremyR

It's an LCD tablet - why are you taking it to the beach to begin with? (Not to mention the small percentage of people who actually have a beach and the amount of time they spend there...)

And you might have missed it, but streaming movies is huge business these days. Netflix, Hulu, etc, etc, etc. Something like half the internet bandwidth is used for video streaming, most of which is done via boxes hooked up to a TV (mostly game consoles, ironically, but also dedicated boxes). The only difference is that it would now go to a tablet.